Word: nbc
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Package Business. During the early 1950s, NBC produced 90% of its own shows. But as broadcasting hours stretched out from predawn to long past midnight, the networks gradually turned to outside packagers to fill up the schedule. Partly this was due to pressure from the Justice Department, which in 1956 threatened antitrust action unless the networks gave independent producers a better share of good TV time. More significantly, in cutting back network-originated production 20% between 1956 and 1959, NBC was able to slice its "creative" payroll, slash overhead...
...network produces 40% of the shows that light up its channels, compared to 30% for CBS, 5% for ABC. Chief network-produced items: news and sports shows; a scattering of hard-to-sell prestige features (NBC Opera, Project 20); a hard core of moneymakers (The Jack Paar Show, You Bet Your Life); and two quizzes (Dough Re Mi and Concentration), originally developed by Barry & Enright, from whom Kintner bought eight other shows last year...
...scheduled network shows, a fact that to some critics explains many of TV's ills. With so much programing in the hands of outsiders, networks have little control; every rigged quiz started out as a packaged product. Some cozy alliances have been formed between the nets and packagers: NBC has traditionally catered to M.C.A. products, ABC to Warner's imitative westerns...
...dangerous new breed of editorial irresponsibility: the purchase of shows sight unseen. Last spring, Packager Don Sharpe sold Mr. Lucky to CBS; at the time he had neither cast nor pilot-only a script that was later discarded. Independents can sucker networks into financing even the shabbiest of productions. NBC spent $1,300,000 to bankroll 26 episodes of a dreary filmed comedy called Love and Marriage, managed to get some of its money back only by plopping the show into a favorable time (Mon., 8-8:30 p.m. E.S.T.), and selling it to an advertiser (Noxzema) that had long...
...should the packagers be sent packing? Few think so. Tax-haunted Hollywood talents savor the capital-gains advantages of independent production. Adds NBC's Kintner: "We simply haven't enough creative brains and personnel to supply all the programs." Undoubtedly, there should be far more network-produced shows, but the real trouble is not that the networks buy from packagers, but that they do not exercise enough care in what they buy. Example: ABC bought the disastrous Adventures in Paradise from 20th Century-Fox, Alaskans, Bourbon Street Beat and Hawaiian Eye from Warner's-all without even...